Scary movies, scary life . . .

Psycho turned 50 yesterday. And the women of a certain age I know still fleetingly think about Janet Leigh sometimes as they step into the shower. Whoever suspected before Alfred Hitchcock's movie that closing that curtain and turning on the water could place one in the quintessentially vulnerable position?

AAAAAAAHHHHHH!

My sister was attending girl's boarding school when Psycho came out. Surely the adult who decided to show it to 500 sequestered girls as their Friday night movie treat was pretty psycho, herself. Paranoia is contagious at boarding school. Being scared is much more entertaining than trigonometry. After the movie, one of my sister's dorm-mates decided to playfully scare a friend who was taking a shower. The friend ended up in the emergency room. It was all very thrilling.

Thinking about Psycho got me to thinking about other scary movies. We do love them, don't we? It's such of a relief to know who or what, exactly, constitutes Big Trouble. Even if it's only pretend Big Trouble, and it's only for a couple of hours.

I remember watching Jaws from the back of a Charlottesville movie theater.When that enormous white fish reared up out of the ocean behind that puny little boat containing Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw, I watched the entire audience jump in unison. I left the theater that night chattering with strangers, bonded with them for life by having experienced together the vanquishing of the Big Bad Fish.

I was interested in the reaction to President Obama's Oval Office speech night before last. David Brooks complained on PBS afterward that it was short on specifics, as though the president should know the specifics of what to do. But then, maybe such knowledge is inferred by giving a speech from the Oval Office. As Dan Kennedy put it on guardian.co.uk,

There was something odd and silly about the idea of Obama's delivering a prime-time, televised address – his first from the magisterial setting of the Oval Office. The oil continues to gush, with estimates about the quantity revised upwards on an almost daily basis. What could he possibly say?

There was also much debate on public radio airwaves yesterday as to whether the war in Afghanistan is going well, what to do about the Gaza blockade, and how could a complete unknown possibly have won the South Carolina Democratic Senatorial primary? People argued and argued and argued, because nobody really knows what's going on, much less what to do about it. And we Americans prefer anything to the unknown, don't we? Or, even worse, the unknowable.

The great challenge of real life these days, as I see it, is to accept that destructive things are out there that cannot be vanquished or even understood in a couple of hours, the time it takes in a cinema. Life is scary; but it is not a scary movie.  We have to keep talking, keep learning, keep trying things. All our arguing, it seems to me, is merely running scared disguised as bluster.

This is Jaws in real life. And the truth is nobody knows what to do about it. The real question is do we, as American citizens, have the guts to face that.

Where is Alfred Hitchcock or Roy Scheider when you need them?

An admission of personal cowardice . . .

Back sometime in the 1980s I tore a photograph of a starving Ethiopian woman and her starving baby out of the newspaper, stuck it in a frame, and put it on my telephone table at work. It's still with me on my desk at WMRA, because I never want to not be reminded that there is great, great human suffering in this world. And that it is my calling as a human being to do whatever I can to alleviate it whenever and wherever I bump into it.

I've stared at that starving Madonna and child for over a quarter of a century now without flinching. And yet, in the long weeks that BP's been spewing oil into the Gulf, whenever I've opened newspapers and seen a photo of of an oil-soaked brown pelican, I've refused to look at it. I've turned the page or clicked the mouse.

No more.

Today on Morning Edition, Nell Greenfieldboyce's story asked the question, "Should Oiled Birds Be Cleaned?"  The story pointed out that the birds caught in oil are not just soaked, they're poisoned as well -- ingesting oil as they preen.

I poked around on the internet and found similar articles on CNN, The Week,  The Daily Beast, and other blogs and on-line news sources. The British newspaper Telegraph's article was bluntly slugged, "BP oil spill: It would be kinder to kill these oil-drenched birds."

It seems we humans may have created suffering on our planet that simply cannot be fixed. So the least I can do is have the guts to look at pictures of it.

The oil is coming . . .

The dailycomet.com of Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, ran this story yesterday. And I thought I'd just cut and paste it into this blog as it's so short and, to me, makes such a powerful comment about the damage being wrought by the BP oil spill.

BP opens claims office in Chauvin
Published: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 4:05 p.m.
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HOUMA – A new BP claims office has been set up in Chauvin.

At the outreach office, 5703 La. 56, you can make a claim for damages or loss of income because of the ongoing Gulf of Mexico spill, which has resulted after the Deepwater Horizon exploded and killed 11 workers April 20.

To file a claim to BP, you can call 800-440-0858 or visit local claims centers. Be sure to bring a picture ID and other business records to prove your income over previous years.

- Grand Isle Community Center, 3811 La. 1, Grand Isle. Open 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday-Sunday

- Plaza Caillou Shopping Center, 814 Grand Caillou Road, suites 2 and 3, Houma. Open 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday-Sunday.

- Old marine business, 5703 La. 56, Chauvin. Open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday-Sunday.

If you've got a moment, read Betsy Gordon's paper for the Louisiana Folklife Society on decorating for the annual Shrimp Blessing in Chauvin, Louisiana. It's a good way to take a look at shrimping country people, celebrating their way of life.

Chauvin, a part of Terrebone Parish, sits (as you  can see in the map above) precariously in the Louisiana swamps, where the BP oil appears to be headed.  I think it's fair to say that its economic viability is already marginal. The median income for a family is $28,897. About 17.1% of families and 20.1% of the population live below the poverty line, including 22.3% of those under age 18 and 27.5% of those age 65 or over. These appear to be people without many resources to fall back on now that fishing activity is curtailed.

The lead story today in the Miami Herald, at the time I'm writing this post, is called The Oil Spill is getting worse. There are also stories headed Oil spill fears focus on Florida Keys, and Gulf oil spill leaves scientists in uncharted territory. And there's a front-page editorial that opines Don't allow emotions to stifle oil-spill options, which begins,

The term ``nuclear option'' has become synonymous with a last-resort action in trying to solve a problem. When it comes to the Gulf oil spill, its meaning is quite literal.

Talk of using an underwater nuclear explosion to seal the oil well leaking from the ocean floor has been gathering momentum since news reports emerged recently that the Russians have used the tactic at least five times to seal off gas-well fires. Now the idea is being pushed by some U.S. observers as well.

``It would definitely work,'' says Christopher Brownfield, a visiting scholar at Columbia University who studies global nuclear policy . . .

I'm normally obsessed with politics, and today I was all set to write about the aftermath of yesterday's primaries. But then I saw that article in dailycomet.com about Chauvin, and that other article in the Miami Herald about the threatened Florida Keys, and that editorial about the nuclear option, and I got to thinking about oil, instead -- about the massive destruction and the many wars we've fought because of our complete societal and financial dependence upon it. Oil literally fuels our economy, faltering as it is under the weight of greed and mismanagement. And those four primaries began to look fairly unimportant next to this massive blob of oil that threatens Chauvin, the Florida Keys, and who knows what else in and around the ocean.

All these politicians running for all these offices, offering solutions to every problem other than our oil dependence. Perhaps it's time for every last one of them to pay a visit to Chauvin.